Maggie was horrified. "Ellen Boardman, would you want Americans to commit murder? You'd better go to church with me next Sunday and hear Mr. Wentworth preach one of his fine sermons."
Ellen did this, and heard a sermon on passive resistance as the best answer to violence. She was accustomed to accepting without question any statement she found in a printed book, or what any speaker said in any lecture. Also her mind, having been uniquely devoted for many years to the problems of office administration, moved with more readiness among letter-files and card-catalogues of customers than among the abstract ideas where now, rather to her dismay, she began to find her thoughts centering. More than a week passed after hearing that sermon before she said, one night as she was brushing her hair: "About the Belgians—if a robber wanted us to let him go through this room so he could get into Mrs. Wilson's room and take all her money and maybe kill her, would you feel all right just to snuggle down in bed and let him? Especially if you had told Mrs. Wilson that she needn't ever lock the door that leads into our room, because you'd see to it that nobody came through?"
"Oh, but," said Maggie, "Mr. Wentworth says it is only the German Government that wanted to invade Belgium, that the German soldiers just hated to do it. If you could fight the German Kaiser, it'd be all right."
Ellen jumped at this admission. "Oh, Mr. Wentworth does think there are some cases where it isn't enough just to stand by, and say you don't like it?"
Maggie ignored this. "He says the people who really get killed are only the poor soldiers that aren't to blame."
Ellen stood for a moment by the gas, her hair up in curl-papers, the light full on her plain, serious face, sallow above the crude white of her straight, unornamented nightgown. She said, and to her own surprise her voice shook as she spoke: "Well, suppose the real robber stayed down in the street and only sent up here to rob and kill Mrs. Wilson some men who just hated to do it, but were too afraid of him not to. Would you think it was all right for us to open our door and let them go through without trying to stop them?"
Maggie did not follow this reasoning, but she received a disagreeable, rather daunting impression from the eyes which looked at her so hard, from the stern, quivering voice. She flounced back on her pillow, saying impatiently: "I don't know what's got into you, Ellen Boardman. You look actually queer, these days! What do you care so much about the Belgians for? You never heard of them before all this began! And everybody knows how immoral French people are."
Ellen turned out the gas and got into bed silently.
Maggie felt uncomfortable and aggrieved. The next time she saw Mr. Wentworth she repeated the conversation to him. She hoped and expected that the young minister would immediately furnish her with a crushing argument to lay Ellen low, but instead he was silent for a moment, and then said: "That's rather an interesting illustration, about the burglars going through your room. Where does she get such ideas?"
Maggie disavowed with some heat any knowledge of the source of her cousin's eccentricities. "I don't know where! She's a stenographer downtown."